There is a line of thought in this country that everything bad that happens in the world—especially as it regards terrorism—will redound to the credit of He, Trump, presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States. The theory goes that, simply because he talks tough about subjects on which he knows precisely less than dick, that the attitude in his remarks will outweigh the complete lack of substantive ideas.

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At this point, I'm not entirely prepared to dismiss this out of hand, but I am willing to say that anyone who truly falls for this line of horse-hockey, let alone anyone who actually believes it, is unquestionably a threat to common sense and public policy. If that makes me an elitist, so be it.

We had another one of those wonderful schizo days on the campaign trail on Tuesday. In the afternoon, standing in front of a wall of recycled plastic, He, Trump gave a speech on the economy and trade that was widely credited with being an adequate event to hijack the issues that most appeal to the disgruntled followers of Bernie Sanders. In this, He, Trump was awarded the rhetorical equivalent of a participation trophy. Later that day, though, after the slaughter at the airport in Istanbul, He, Trump gave a speech in Ohio in which he plainly lost his grip on reality. Again.

In brief, and thanks to Josh's joint, He, Trump has decided that the world has no choice but to waterboard itself out of its current peril. Via TPM:

"We can't do waterboarding but they can do chopping off heads, drowning people in steel cages, they can do whatever they want to do," Trump told attendees at a St. Clairsville, Ohio rally. "You know, you have to fight fire with fire." At least 36 people were killed and over 140 were wounded in multiple suicide bombings at one of the world's busiest airports. Turkish officials have said Islamic State fighters were likely responsible for the attack. "Folks, there's something going on that's really really bad," Trump said at the rally. "All right? It's bad. And we better get smart and we better get tough or we're not going to have much much of a country left, okay? It's bad. Terrible." Trump asked the crowd what they thought about waterboarding, a form of simulated drowning that was banned by George W. Bush's administration in 2006. "I like it a lot," he said to cheers from the crowd. "I don't think it's tough enough."

It is here where it becomes necessary to point out that we did all of this stuff for seven years.

We tortured people ourselves and we also outsourced the job to various governments who were less squeamish than we were. We sent innocent people into black sites and Syrian prisons on mere suspicion. We mugged due process and kept people penned up at Gitmo without the semblance of a trial. We invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. We bombed our way to regime change in Libya. We've droned our way across Pakistan and Yemen. At home, we searched without warrants and wiretapped without cause, and bankrupted the treasury.

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If He, Trump doesn't think we've been tough enough in this conflict, he's a thoroughgoing sociopath or a bloodthirsty charlatan, or both. And yet, with all that, events like the attack in Istanbul keep on happening. Maybe tough talk—backed up with mindless violence—isn't really the way to go. And Trump's most fervent followers cheered his endorsement of torture as loudly as they cheered his condemnation of the TPP, which should tell us all something about the people who plan to vote for him.

GettyJohn Moore

I mention this only because there seems to be a rising dynamic within progressive circles that the Brexit vote in Great Britain and the Trump phenomenon in this country must be appreciated as more than simply new tunes on the white-nationalist house organ; that they represent a genuine grassroots rebellion against the people and institutions that have done so much damage to the various economies of so many people around the world.

In Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi cautions us against being too smug about the economic concerns of the people in the UK, and, in today's New York Times, Bernie Sanders goes a long way toward attaching his campaign to the Brexit plebiscite, but only to its economic outrage, and not to the know-nothing xenophobia that fueled turnout, and that became plainly obvious in the aftermath of the vote.

Let's be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change. But we do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign's rhetoric—and is central to Donald J. Trump's message.

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And Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, also is all-in on this fairytale. Last Friday, in the aftermath of the referendum in the UK, she decided that what the British people were really doing was endorsing her candidacy for the White House.

"The vote in Britain to exit the European Union (EU) is a victory for those who believe in the right of self-determination and who reject the pro-corporate, austerity policies of the political elites in EU. The vote says no to the EU's vision of a world run by and for big business. It is also a rejection of the European political elite and their contempt for ordinary people."

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Good god, can we all settle down?

"Neo-liberalism" is not a magic word that makes xenophobia disappear, and chanting "DLC!" is not a spell that converts an enthusiasm for torture into a formidable attack on the globalized economic elites. It does not transform Nigel Farage into Ramsay MacDonald any more than it transforms He, Trump into Fightin' Bob LaFollette.

What all of these analyses fall into is the moral ravine at the bottom of which can be found the crumpled remnants of any number of American populist movements. Down there you can find Tom Watson, the firebrand from Georgia. He began his career as a champion of the rural poor; it was Watson who pretty much invented the Rural Free Delivery system. In 1892, he stood boldly for re-election to the House on a platform that included anti-lynching legislation. Four years later, in his newspaper, The People's Party Paper, Watson published vividly his contempt for how his people had been treated by the institutional Democratic party of the time.

His words might sound just a tad familiar.

Populism is allowed to come to furnish all the campaign principles, all the self-sacrifice and patriotism, and the two million votes which the Democrats need, but they are not allowed to furnish a candidate for either place on the ticket... it appears the Democratic managers would be willing to make a sacrifice of both Bryan and silver, if they can but destroy Populism.

At the time, Watson was running as the titular vice-presidential candidate on the Populist Party ticket with William Jennings Bryan, who pretty much ignored him. As the issue of whether or not to blend the Populist Party with the formal Democratic Party heated up, Bryan accepted a businessman named Arthur Sewall as his running mate on the Democratic Party ticket, having accomplished "fusion" without consulting his Populist running mate. Watson then essentially ran against everyone, including his own running mate, in the general election.

Tom Watson, c. 1908

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This tangled mess is important only in what came later. By 1904, when he ran for president on the Populist ticket again, Tom Watson was as virulent a racist as ever has run for president. This is what can happen if people who claim to be populists ignore both the lessons of history, and the forces that may be working in the shadows behind what appear to be their own noble aims. You can't just wave off the racism behind the Trump campaign, or the xenophobia behind the Brexit campaign. That's not politics. That's wishful thinking. And it's dangerous.

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As to the distrust of direct democracy, which so bothers my friend Matt Taibbi, I will grant the point that some of the howling from the plutocrats has been amusing in its pure impotent outrage, and I also will grant that some of the elite analysis both here and across the pond bears more than a little stench of the old imperialist dodge. (In Great Britain? Unpossible!) But this also was a cause that never would have caught fire without the accelerant of existing bigotry among the people for whom the whole election was nothing more than a chance to hock a loogie at the people they hate. Not every vote for Brexit was mindless, anymore than any vote for Donald Trump is reckless, but far too many of them are for my comfort.

Certainly in my lifetime, plebiscites generally have sucked. They brought us Proposition 13 in California, which in turn touched off 30 years of retrograde social policy in the various states. (Indeed, California's wild-west referendum process used to bring the government there to a near standstill so often that you could set your clock by it.) I've heard far too many people who wanted to let "the people decide" on things like marriage equality, as though you should be able to put civil liberties up to a plebiscite.

Not every vote for Brexit was mindless, anymore than any vote for Donald Trump is reckless, but far too many of them are for my comfort.

And anyone who can look at our corrupt, money-soaked political system now and defend direct democracy has a long push up a dirt road to convince me. The Founders distrusted it, and with good reason, but they created a political infrastructure within which direct democracy and representative democracy both could function according to mutually agreed upon principles.

And if you don't want to take Andrew Sullivan's word for it, take that of Karl Marx, who, in his 18th Brumaire, was scathing in his condemnation of the plebiscite that brought the buffoon Louis Napoleon into power in France:

On the other hand, proletarian revolutions, like those of the nineteenth century, constantly criticize themselves, constantly interrupt themselves in their own course, return to the apparently accomplished, in order to begin anew; they deride with cruel thoroughness the half-measures, weaknesses, and paltriness of their first attempts, seem to throw down their opponents only so the latter may draw new strength from the earth and rise before them again more gigantic than ever, recoil constantly from the indefinite colossalness of their own goals – until a situation is created which makes all turning back impossible…

I don't completely trust revolutions of any kind, whether I agree with their goals or not. Vox populi may well be vox dei, but the voice of exactly what kind of god will be unclear until human beings are capable of discerning Jesus from Moloch in their appetites.

Until then, I'll steer clear of people who argue that there is democratic progress to be born out of xenophobia, or human rights out of bigotry. I'll stay a nice distance from people who dive for pearls in a river full of crocodiles. If that makes me an elitist, so be it. If it makes me a snob, tough break. If that makes me an incrementalist, I'll stand with Mr. Madison, and behind what he wrote in Federalist 55:

In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason. Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

As I look over the politics of the moment, a Socrates isn't exactly making himself obvious. Just sayin'.